Anno Frankenstein

by Jonathan Green

  “Yes,” he said, leaning back in the chair beside the fire and taking another sip from his hip flask. “I think I fully understand the purpose of your mission now.”

  “I can’t believe they’d do that to us,” Dina said, her face pale. “They were prepared to let us march in there with Jekyll, knowing what would happen… We could have been killed.”

  The others all turned and looked at her, disbelief writ large on their faces.

  “You’re not serious?” Trixie said.

  “Have you not heard of the term ‘collateral damage’?” Missy laughed mirthlessly.

  “Acceptable losses,” Cat muttered.

  Hercules looked on the girl more kindly. “Desperate times call for desperate measures, I suppose.”

  “So, what do you suggest we do?” Cookie challenged him. “Seeing as how you seem to have all the answers.”

  “We continue with the mission – as originally planned.”

  “Precisely as planned?”

  “Well, with a few modifications.”

  Hercules turned to Jekyll.

  “You up for that, doc?”

  Jekyll fixed him with a cold stare. “Do I really have a choice?” he said, darkly.

  “Great!” Hercules clapped his hands. “Then let’s get started!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Suicide Blondes

  “SO LET ME just check I’ve got this straight,” Cookie said, once they had all dried out, got dressed and gathered again in front of the roaring fire. “You’re suggesting that we infiltrate Castle Frankenstein and unleash Hyde once we’re inside?”

  “I’m sitting right here!” Jekyll grunted disconsolately.

  Hercules glanced his way but chose to ignore him. “That’s right,” he said.

  “And how do you propose we do that?” Cookie asked.

  “Well, I was actually going to leave the details to you. After all, you know what your girls are capable of better than me. And, anyway, isn’t that what you do? I’m sure you’ll be able to cook something up between you.”

  “But it’ll be suicide!”

  Hercules gave her a smile and a wink. “I thought suicide missions were your thing.”

  Cookie weakened at that, unable to help but smile. “Very well, Mr Quicksilver, we’ll do it your way. But if Jekyll, or Hyde, or whatever he is, ends up getting us all killed, I’m going to haunt you for the rest of eternity.”

  “Is that a threat or a promise?” Hercules smiled.

  “Touché, Mr Quicksilver.”

  “I need some fresh air,” Jekyll muttered, getting up and making for the door. Not one of the others moved to stop him.

  “Don’t go running off now,” Hercules called after him.

  “Where would I go?” the doctor growled in response.

  The front door of the lodge banged shut behind him.

  “Talking of the good doctor,” Dina said, now that he was out of earshot, “are you sure it’s a good idea – taking him with us, I mean?”

  “We’ve managed to bring him this far,” Hercules pointed out, “and against the odds, I might add. You yourselves risked life and limb to rescue us from Schloss Geisterhaus.”

  “But Dina’s got a point,” Missy said, backing up her friend. “I mean Hyde’s hardly shown himself to be the reliable type, has he?”

  “Yeah, he’s unpredictable at best,” Jinx threw in, “at worst…”

  “I know,” Cookie said, butting in, “and I hear what you’re saying, but orders are orders. We haven’t got this far to give up now.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting we should,” Dina threw in.

  “The doctor comes with us, okay?”Cookie cast a furious gaze around the group. Dina and Jinx suddenly found the knotty holes in the floorboards at their feet inexplicably interesting, while Missy met her leader’s stare defiantly. “Okay?”

  There were murmured mutters of assent, while Cat – her hair tied in a tight ponytail again – nodded enthusiastically. “If Hercules thinks that’s best,” she added.

  Trixie threw her a bored scowl.

  “What? If those are our orders…”

  “You could at least keep him guessing a bit longer,” Trixie muttered. “At least until the mission’s over.”

  “You know what they say?” Cat said fiercely. “Carpe diem!”

  “Right,” Cookie said loudly, in an effort to regain order, “so here’s the plan...”

  ISLA VON HAUPSTEIN sprinted through the woods, bounding over the fungus-infested trunks of fallen trees and leaping over boulders, revelling in the freedom to run free, unrestrained by orders or convention. The thrill of the hunt thumped in her veins, her mind heady with the rush of scents and other, subtler sensations that her altered physique could detect.

  She crossed the forested slopes with long, leaping strides, relishing the rush of adrenalin flooding her bloodstream and bringing her to the verge of the change.

  Her quarry had been carried away several miles downstream by the force of the swollen river some hours before the convoy had even reached the dam. But some trace of them lingered.

  She saw the scents as colours and patterns, a visual cacophony that only she could make sense of. Strongest of all were the bilious yellow of fear and the deep crimson of unrestrained rage.

  But this was the one thing that Isla couldn’t work out. Those two contradictory fragrances seemed somehow inextricably linked, as if they came from the same source; as if there were two separate identities inhabiting the one body.

  And now she could smell wood smoke, the diluted scents of her prey mingling with the aroma of resin, painting an impossible rainbow of colours across her cerebral cortex and helping her to refocus.

  She raced on, her body on fire with vitality.

  She tensed suddenly and, landing in a thicket of thorns, froze. The curious yellow dread, with its almost overpowering undercurrent of fury, was suddenly stronger.

  Carefully moving aside a trailing bramble, Isla von Haupstein peered through the encroaching darkness, her eyes instantly alighting upon the thin-framed figure standing there, shivering in the twilight, his breath misting in the chill air.

  Silent as a hunting wild cat, she padded towards the lonely lodge.

  JEKYLL STARTED, SHOOTING panicked glances into the encroaching gloom, turning his head left and right trying in vain to see anything at all through the encroaching dusk. He had thought he’d heard the snap of a twig underfoot.

  “Who’s there?” he hissed.

  There was a rustle of leaves nearby.

  And then his already quickening pulse skipped a beat altogether as a raven-haired goddess stepped into the light from the undraped windows of the lodge, like some Wagnerian Valkyrie.

  Transfixing him with her piercing stare, she tilted her head back, exposing the swan-like curve of her neck. Nostrils flaring, she savoured the scents on the air.

  “Who are you?” he croaked, his voice a cracked whisper, backing across the veranda towards the door.

  The woman replied with a strong German accent. “I think the real question is, what are you?”

  HERCULES OPENED THE door and stepped out onto the veranda. There was no one there.

  “Jekyll?” he called into the encroaching night. And then again, louder: “Henry! Henry Jekyll!”

  Leaning over the edge of the veranda he listened, absorbing all the sounds of the night before trying one last time. “Jekyll!”

  Moments later he returned to the warmth of the lodge, looking pale and drawn.

  The Monstrous Regiment turned, their expressions darkening as they saw the desperate glint in his eye.

  “He’s gone,” Hercules said bluntly.

  “What do you mean gone? He can’t be gone!” Cookie challenged him. “I mean, where would he go?”

  “Take a look for yourself then,” Hercules said, stepping away from the open door and gesturing for her to go through it.

  Intrigued, the group gathered at the door as their leader joined Hercules outside o
n the veranda.

  “You’re sure?” she said, looking at him with plaintive eyes. “I mean people don’t just vanish.”

  “You’re sure about that, are you?” Hercules said, recalling the empty farmhouse he had raided for supplies not long after arriving in Germany. “This is a country under military rule; anything could happen.”

  “So where’s he gone and run off to?” Cat asked, staring at Cookie and Hercules in bewilderment.

  “I don’t believe he ran off anywhere,” Hercules said, now crouched on the dirt track in front of the lodge, peering at the ground by the light spilling from the open front door.

  He rose and turned to face the women waiting on the veranda, seeing that Missy had a pistol ready in her right hand.

  “There are two sets of fresh prints here – other than ours, I mean,” he said. “It looks to me like he was taken.”

  “Taken?” Dina laughed. “But Hyde would hardly have let that happen, would he?”

  “That a very good point.”

  The party looked at each other, the concern writ large upon their faces. In the silence that fell between them, Hercules suddenly dearly wished to hear the crash of undergrowth and the bullish roars of the enraged Hyde again.

  “This is worse than I thought,” he said.

  “This is bad,” Cookie said, putting into words what they were all clearly thinking. “Very bad.”

  What could have befallen Jekyll that prevented even Hyde from coming to his rescue?

  “Sorry, girls,” Cookie said, addressing her crack team. “Looks like the mission’s off.”

  “It most definitely is not!” Hercules railed. “We go ahead as planned.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “We have to rescue Jekyll,” he said, rounding on her. “Don’t you see? Just because a bunch of half-senile surgeons back in Edinburgh couldn’t successfully recreate Jekyll’s experiments doesn’t mean Hitler’s pet geniuses in the Frankenstein Corps won’t be able to. And if they get their hands on the secret of Jekyll’s success, it can only end badly for our side.”

  Cookie nodded slowly, saying nothing.

  “But how can you be sure he’s been taken to Castle Frankenstein?” Jinx challenged.

  “Where else would they take him?”

  “So, what do you suggest, Hercules?” Cat asked, ignoring the disapproving tut-tut-tut that escaped Trixie’s lips.

  “We go with the plan as agreed,” Hercules said, “only now we have two objectives; to destroy the facility and rescue Jekyll.”

  Cookie turned to him, a look of begrudging admiration on her face. “Anything else?”

  “Yes. We go tonight.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-ONE

  The Best Laid Plans

  THE NIGHT WAS cold, the sky clear, the moon a portentous presence in the heavens above, bathing the fortress in its ethereal light. Private Scholz scanned the vista beyond the perimeter of Castle Frankenstein, flexing his gloved hands about the trigger paddles of the Czechoslovak mounted in the gun emplacement, his fingers aching from the cold. He had lost all feeling in his toes as well. He didn’t know who he had pissed off to end up on look-out duty during the graveyard shift, but he was sure he was paying the price now.

  Castle Frankenstein never slept. The production line of the corpse-factory worked day and night to reanimate the dead and send them back to the front line – a forest of chimney stacks belching smoke and steam into the chill mountain air – but from midnight to dawn, the fortress was at its quietest. The motor pool and inner courtyard were as quiet as they ever got, while the scientists and flesh-wranglers of the Frankenstein Corps worked by the electricity that powered almost everything within the castle, from lighting the laboratories to reanimating the reconstructed Prometheans improved by the Corps’ flesh-smiths.

  But since the destruction of the dam earlier that day, the supply of electricity from the power station had dropped off considerably. While the engineers were struggling to repair the dam as best they could, the castle was running on reserve power, the massive machines employed by the production line steadily draining the acres of reserve batteries buried beneath the castle in their lead-lined vaults.

  The pylons stretched away west towards the dam – skeletal figures, black against the velvet blue of midnight – connecting the turbine halls there with the castle, the power-lines they carried crackling with the weak bursts of electricity the dam could still provide.

  Ever since the attack on the power station, and then the arrival of the Devil himself, along with the rest of his cavalcade, the whole castle had been on edge. The British agent’s secret weapon might now be in Nazi custody, but there was a rumour among the men that there was a crack commando unit still out there somewhere, on the loose in the forested hills of Hessen.

  Private Scholz, however, was confident that no matter how elite and deadly they might be, they wouldn’t dare launch an attack on Castle Frankenstein.

  He glanced to his right, to the adjacent gatehouse watchtower. The other look-out, Weber, had his eyes locked firmly on the road winding up from the valley below, around the curve of the hill to the castle gates. The echo of a round being chambered reached Scholz’s ears.

  Scholz followed the other look-out’s gaze down to the approach to the castle, and then he saw what Weber must have seen too, and had the sights of the Czechoslovak gun trained on the target in a moment.

  There were two of them, limned in the silvery light of the moon.

  Squinting through the sights, releasing the left hand trigger paddle, Scholz reached for the tower’s telephone handset and cranked the handle – doing everything one-handed – and waited for his counterpart in the other tower to pick up.

  “What do you make of that?” Scholz asked.

  “An officer – a colonel, by the looks of it – and a lone prisoner,” Weber’s voice crackled back over the line. “Must have become separated from the rest of the Lieutenant-Colonel’s party.”

  “You’re sure?” Scholz challenged.

  “Let Voight and Ziegler deal with them,” Weber said, casting a glance at the gate below before returning to scanning the night beyond.

  “COLONEL MERKUR TO see the commandant,” the approaching officer announced, pushing the bound woman before him with the barrel of his Luger.

  “I’m sorry, Colonel Merkur, but Colonel Kahler is occupied at present,” said the gate guard, his greatcoat buttoned up against the cold and his helmet pushed down firmly on his head.

  “I’m sure he is, private,” Merkur said, “but he’ll want to know about this.” The officer prodded the woman again with his gun. “I’ve captured another one of them.”

  Voight looked the young woman up and down. Her svelte figure was clad in dark, tight-fitting fatigues, her wrists tied with what looked like one of the Colonel’s bootlaces.

  Private Voight hesitated for a moment, uncertain what to do. He didn’t want to disturb the commandant’s meeting with the Devil, but if Colonel Merkur had caught up with another enemy spy, the others should probably know about it too.

  “Yes, of course, Herr Colonel,” he said, turning back to the gateway behind him, signalling for his companion on the other side to raise the checkpoint barrier and open the gates. “Right away.”

  The Colonel pushed his captive towards the gate once again, causing the woman to stumble and fall against Voight.

  Before the private could even utter a grunt of surprise, his own gun was pulled from his hands and his legs kicked out from under him.

  He fell to the ground, landing on his hands and knees. And there was the girl standing over him, her hands somehow free, and his gun in her hands.

  There was a muffled report and the other guard dropped to the ground, groaning softly, his hands to his stomach.

  In the instant it took the private to realise what was happening, there was another gunshot and Voight never heard anything else ever again.

  AS SOON AS he heard the first muffled shot fro
m below, Scholz leant forward, aiming his gun at the wan pools of light cast by the flickering lanterns on the gate below.

  There was a second shot as he struggled to focus on what was going on down there. His eyes fell on the two prone figures lying on the ground in front of the checkpoint.

  They had been duped. But the infiltrators wouldn’t get past the gate – Private Scholz would see to it personally.

  There was the pfft of a silenced gunshot from somewhere amidst the inky shadows among the trees beyond the castle, followed by a faint moan from the nearest watchtower.

  Caught off guard, Schloz glanced to the right, his heart pounding against his ribs. There was no sign of Weber.

  He snapped his view back to the impenetrable treeline, the enemy below forgotten as his natural instinct for survival tried to pinpoint where the sniper’s shot had come from, painfully aware that he could be next.

  As a result, he was taken completely by surprise when an attacker swung down from the lip of parapet above him, planting two feet firmly in the middle of his chest and sending him stumbling backwards to the floor of the gun-nest, beside the Czechoslovak, and a svelte form landed cat-like on top of him.

  One hand closed over his nose and mouth and the other plunged a knife up to the hilt into his kidney. His gasp of shock and pain was muffled by the smothering hand, which held firm as a cold numbness rapidly spread throughout his body.

  “ANY PROBLEMS?” MISSY asked Cat as the two passed each other on the tower stairs.

  “Like taking candy from a baby,” the assassin purred. “You?”

  “Bulls-eye,” Missy said, forming an imaginary pistol with her right hand and miming taking a shot.

  As the sniper took her position as look-out at the top of the sentry post, Cat joined Hercules and Cookie in the shadows beyond the gate, and Trixie, Jinx and Dina jogged from the cover of the trees and up the road to join them.